Robin Bowman - Photo Journalist

Robin Bowman has trained her lens on some of the world’s most troubled places, including Africa, Bosnia, and Israel. Her work, published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Life, Time, and Newsweek, has documented social and political ills from child abuse in America to life after genocide in Rwanda.

Bowman’s latest project was a five-year, 21,731-mile road trip across the US, photographing and interviewing more than 400 teenagers from many backgrounds and regions, including NY gang members, Amish sisters from Missouri and a Kentucky coal miner. The resulting book, It’s Complicated: The American Teenager, won the Gold Medal in the Photography category of the 2008 Independent Publishers Book Awards. Join us for this unique perspective on American youth culture.

W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fellow (2005) Robin Bowman has been working as a freelance photojournalist for 26 years, documenting the most poignant international social and political issues of our time.

Bowman’s photographs have appeared in publications worldwide, including The New Yorker, Life, Time, Newsweek, People and the German Stern, among others, demonstrating her fierce commitment to creating concern for the human condition by covering major upheavals and the aftermath of crises in an attempt to understand how such things come to pass. Her coverage has included stories from Bosnia during the war, to Rwanda covering the aftermath of genocide. From Israel covering the results of the ongoing conflict to the jungles of Mexico where Bowman spent six years living on and off with the Subcommandante Marcos and the Zapatista National Liberation Army.

Her latest book “It’s Complicated: The American Teenager” (Umbrage, Nov. 2007), which won the Best Photography Book of the 2008 Independent Book Publishers Awards and was named as one of the top ten books for young people by the YALSA, a division of the American Library Association, pairs portraits and stunningly candid interviews made over a period of five years with over 400 teens around the U.S. The entire collection of 263 portraits and transcripts was recently purchased by the New York Public Library for its permanent collection, with the intention of mounting an exhibition. The NYPL’s curator of photography has compared the collection to the Depression Era documentary work of the legendary WPA and FSA. MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer-prize winning author, Kate Boo, describes it best when she writes that Bowman’s “camera seems to listen, and the faces she captures with it sing.”

Now, using the social justice issues raised by “It’s Complicated” as a springboard, Bowman gives presentations and runs workshops to promote tolerance and social awareness for students and teachers.